NeoOffice®/J uses the open source development model to leverage the resources of a global partnership of volunteer programmers, users, and testers.

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NeoOffice®/J uses the open source development model to leverage the resources of a global community of volunteer programmers, users, and testers.

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"My goal was to create a self-supporting community," said Luby. "I felt that if people really wanted an application like NeoOffice®/J, they would help by reporting bugs, answering support questions, and maybe even making donations."

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"My goal was to create a self-supporting, volunteer-based project to build an office suite for Mac OS X,," said Luby. "I felt that if people really wanted an application like NeoOffice®/J, they would help by reporting bugs, answering support questions, and maybe even making donations."

"As the user base has grown and become more involved, NeoOffice®/J has benefited and improved accordingly," Luby added. "It's truly the users' contributions that have made NeoOffice®/J what it is today."

"As the user base has grown and become more involved, NeoOffice®/J has benefited and improved accordingly," Luby added. "It's truly the users' contributions that have made NeoOffice®/J what it is today."

Revision as of 12:40, 8 June 2005

This is the page where we will draft the news release to be used upon the availability of NeoOffice/J 1.1 Final/GM.

Sunnyvale, California, USA - Planamesa Software and the NeoOffice.org community are proud to introduce NeoOffice®/J 1.1, a Mac OS X-native version of the OpenOffice.org office suite that includes Microsoft Office-compatible word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing applications.

"This release is the culmination of many thousands of volunteer hours," said NeoOffice®/J creator and primary developer Patrick Luby. "As a result of this tremendous effort, we have a very stable, full-featured office suite for Mac OS X that supports dozens of languages."

"When I started the NeoOffice®/J project, there really was no viable alternative to Microsoft's Mac version of Office," noted Luby. "There were other Mac word processors, but few that included spreadsheet and presentation support. The cross-platform OpenOffice.org suite did all three very well AND featured strong compatibility with Microsoft office documents. So creating a native Mac OS X version of OpenOffice.org seemed like a good idea."

A Feature-Complete, World-Class Office Solution

NeoOffice®/J 1.1 provides compatibility with Microsoft Office and Corel WordPerfect and offers a robust feature set common to all major office suites, including the ability to track changes as a document is forwarded from one user to another. NeoOffice®/J can export to many formats including PDF, HTML, Flash, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Its native file format is open and XML-based, freeing users’ documents from vendor lock-in, a frequent complaint of proprietary office suites.

NeoOffice®/J 1.1 also offers localized user interfaces in FORTY languages and supports text entry in Roman and non-Roman scripts, including South Asian, East Asian, right-to-left and complex text layout scripts. This has allowed individuals and organizations across the globe-- including schools, non-profits, and corporations-- to adopt NeoOffice®/J as their primary office suite.

"We've leveraged OpenOffice.org's amazing internationalization efforts, which makes NeoOffice®/J a great solution for Mac OS X users all around the world," said Peterlin.

"NeoOffice®/J 1.1 is a standalone, double-clickable Mac application and does NOT require additional X11 software," said core engineer and NeoOffice.org founder Ed Peterlin. "Our goal is to make NeoOffice®/J 100% indistinguishable from any other Macintosh application in look-and-feel. Version 1.1 is a major step in that direction."

Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" Spotlight Support

NeoOffice®/J 1.1 also includes NeoLight, a plugin for Spotlight, the new search feature in Apple's Mac OS X 10.4. "With this plugin, your NeoOffice®/J files will be indexed and can be searched instantly in a familiar, Mac-like fashion," added Peterlin. "It's just another way we're working to integrate with the full Mac OS X experience."

Open Source Development

NeoOffice®/J uses the open source development model to leverage the resources of a global community of volunteer programmers, users, and testers.

"My goal was to create a self-supporting, volunteer-based project to build an office suite for Mac OS X,," said Luby. "I felt that if people really wanted an application like NeoOffice®/J, they would help by reporting bugs, answering support questions, and maybe even making donations."

"As the user base has grown and become more involved, NeoOffice®/J has benefited and improved accordingly," Luby added. "It's truly the users' contributions that have made NeoOffice®/J what it is today."

"Today's release is only the beginning."

Availability

Released as free, open source software under the GNU General Public License, NeoOffice®/J 1.1 is available now at http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/. Users are encouraged to download and freely distribute the software. Development of the application is ongoing by volunteer programmers, beta-testers, artists, and writers. Interested parties are invited to visit http://trinity.neooffice.org for more information about helping with the project.

Planamesa Software is a software development consulting company owned and operated by Patrick Luby. Patrick has spent nearly a decade working as a software developer in a variety of commercial and open source projects including OpenOffice.org and Apache Tomcat using the C, C++, and Java programming languages on a variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows™.

About NeoOffice.org

NeoOffice.org is home for the NeoOffice®/J open-source community and features news, downloads, FAQs, discussion forums, a bug reporting system, and more for NeoOffice®/J developers and end users. NeoOffice®/J's "Aquafication" and other development is ongoing, and interested parties are invited to help with all aspects of the project. NeoOffice® is a registered trademark of Edward H. Peterlin.

Tentative Freeze Date

The English text of the Announcement will be frozen (no further changes) on June 3June 10 to allow translators enough time to translate the text into their languages (early in case we need to move the release date forward by one week due to Community Relations team availability) and to recruit new translations (fr, it, what others should we try to recruit translators for?). This date is tentative and still open for discussion.

What's Missing?

What needs to be added/changed/done before we freeze the text for translation?

In no particular order:

An additional "business-centric" feature for A Feature-Complete Office Solution section, so that "track changes" doesn't seem so alonesection reworked by sardisson and added document format openness/ownership of data bits

A quote from Patrick, perhaps about the development or testing process (not absolutely necessary)lots of cool Patrick quotes

Verify with Ed his "quotes" are acceptable

Agree on a replacement for "A Real Mac App" (first) section headersardisson went with Ray's

Note the general PR rule seems to be to use the ® (in our case) sign with your trademarks but leave all marks off other companies' products and simply use the "other company and product names" sentence--don't have to worry about verifying whose trademarks are which kind and what is trademarked and not and so forth....

--Ovvldc 16:37, 25 Apr 2005 (CDT) Translated the new draft. I still do not like the long sentence in the second paragraph...
--Ovvldc 04:52, 26 Apr 2005 (CDT) fixed to match the latest draft. Better text, maybe too many 'Mac OS X' in the second paragraph.